Schaefer on HBR.org: “It Depends”

What happens when you put three business professors in a rental car and send them out to talk to owners and managers of small- and medium-sized businesses? Would they discover their MBA frameworks to be a bunch of academic mumbo-jumbo with no real applicability? What we found is that there’s no best path to business success. Managers successfully address seemingly similar problems in very different ways and, as our corollary suggests, the trick is to find which solution fits with the specifics of your business.

Oddly, HBR titled the piece “The Answer to Every Business Question Is It Depends,” which is a not quite right version of Mazzeo’s Law. We think it’s only every strategic question… Close enough is ok at Harvard, it seems?